CNN: Messy Eating Habits Might Reveal Elusive Black Hole

At school, I could not read
the assessment without the asses

they clung like nits to the root
of the word. Those egg-round

cheeks pinched firmly to the sment
waiting for the perfect moment

to be born. You can’t just brush them off,
Mrs. Nurse said, those grape big grapes.

Dad did his thing— he massaged my head,
breaking up my skull into white lumps of dough

in his hands, hands I wore as glasses.
Dad pushed me into cuneiform

books he pulled from stacks. I couldn’t see
how the other children saw. The Indian

in the Cupboard in 4th grade
I wasn’t good enough to read.

His rivers run backwards,
Ms. Mirror said, as she pointed left-my right

to the map I’d drawn. The only one she’d hung
inside the bathroom door above the wash

your hands. Dad figured it was all distraction—a cat
5 hurricane of disoriented dreaming reversing the course

of my headwaters to my mouth & 10-fingered delta distributaries.
He hid my soccer ball in the gravity

well beneath his bed where he thought I couldn’t reach it.
But I pulled it out like Magic Messy did—

genius footballer, foodie and astrophysicist,
as Mr. CNN said— I reached into the singularity,

light-warping
                    letter-bending homo
                                                        phone & graphs             oh mission!
                                                                   Trans’
                                                                                                                           position
Rev’s
                                                ersals
                                       sub’s tits
                                          you tions,
                                                my tions,

                                                     all the tions my heart caught
like fireflies beneath the dark
                                                      print & mind like a cupboard clinging
to the indian in the corner forever in 4th grade
not allowed to read the nits on the roots
of the rolling ball, my asses to the sment like Magic Messy did
when eating casually a churrasco he revealed a bleeding
light, a chewed up, spat-out star left tumbling through the universe
by an elusive black hole. Trapped it, touched it, and tapped it
                                                                                                  beautifully into goal.

Andres Sanabria is a Colombian born teacher currently working at an international school in China. Before that, he worked in Korea for 9 years. He teaches English Literature, which he suspects his own ESL teachers—the same teachers who identified his dyslexia—would find hilarious. Somehow, he’s made it work, though.